Wilgekommen!
Where in Germany are you from?
Hello Ambiorix!
I am living in a small town near Zwickau in Saxony. That is in the former GDR. But I was born and raised in West Germany. The culture shock was (and still is) amazing.
didnt the DDR renamed Chemnitz into "Karl-Marx-stadt"?
How do you mean shocking? How do the people there compare to West-Germans? some examples?
Yes, Chemnitz, formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt, formerly Chemnitz is not too far away from here.
Let me try to explain:
First, the people are much friendlier than at home. 16 months among them may be not enough for a serious assessment and I am far from having sorted out what is the 'inbred' good-naturedness of the Saxons (who have notably -- like the Bavarians -- never been Prussians) is and what the habitual sticking together against a totalitarian state and ducking a rigid system. People here will go out far of their way to help you, literally and metaphorically. I am experiencing it on an almost daily basis. Case in point: A friend of mine, who maybe shouldn't drive all over Europe alone in a small fast car, got lost at night while searching for my place. Some young people she had asked for directions piloted her here by leading her with their own car. I guess they drove at least 30 kilometers out of their way and then they made sure that my friend had safely arrived where she intended to arrive before they left. That kind of helpfulness is not unusual here but absolutely unheard of where I come from.
What Communism has destroyed is any gentility and that has only peripherally to do with poverty. One finds very few people with good manners or taste here, even among those with a good job and education. I think "gauche" is the word, or maybe "uncouth". Maybe that will go away, given time.
But what gets seriously on my nerves is the "DDR nostalgia". If one is talking about the former GDR-system it will probably start in quite a critical manner, but it will INVARIABLY end how this that and the other and basically everything had been absolutely wonderful back then.
Yeah! If you wanted to leave that effing country, you were shot dead at the border, but they had ALL places at the kindergarten for their children. I avoid talking about it if I can.
I am a Catholic myself and I find that the members of the small congregation (500 in a town of 25,000 inhabitants) have escaped those mechanisms, including the manners-thing, to an amazing extent. But then, they have never even begun to allow the system to swallow them, different from the Protestants. Why that is so is worth a doctor's thesis, not a message board post.
The communists absolutely hated and destroyed everything to do with the countryside. Have you ever heard of the LPGs? That was the term for the collective farms and they were an abomination against nature and mankind. They abolished all villages and put the farmers into huge ugly blocks of flats that are still disgracing the countryside and whereas the grand urban villas were just left to decay, traditional farmhouses and villages were vitually obliterated. They built grotesquely huge stables and siloes that set on the landscape like pockmarks and which are still there. They built gigantic tractors, even imported ROCKET tractors from Russia for agricultural purposes, whose sheer weight destroyed the soil, they obliterated the traditional fields and replaced them with acreage vaster than the eye can take in, and don't get me started what THAT did to flora and fauna. They hated the countryside and all it implied with a perverted, sick passion.
Not that this sort of "agriculture" was able to feed the population decently, mind you. But then, that wasn't its purpose in the first place.
The system crept in every nook and cranny of peoples' life, they sniffed the underwear, the bedclothes, they totally and utterly broke the people.
Many people here still can't meet your eyes, they behave like zombies if they have to see a member of the state authorities and they would never complain about anything because the police or other authorities are, for them, not there to help you, but to get you into trouble. 17 years don't get 40 years of dictatorship out of people's systems. On the other hand there are still those who had been or would have been informers in the "good" old days, who are fast like a lightning to threaten you with "calling the police" if they don't like something and it usually works a treat because people here are, as I said, frightened and will instantaneously cave in. I usually tell them to call the police pronto and the Stasi as well, which shuts them up quite effectively.
Such an opinion would bring me in trouble in todays Germany, mind you. At a time, when Nobel Laureate (and since then outed SS-man) Günther Grass calls the former GDR a "kommode Diktatur" (something like "comfortable dictatorship") and gets huge acclaim for it, an opinion like mine is highly unpopular.
